Page 67 of The Primary Pest
How long? How long did he have before Peter and Chet—Christ, he should have realized anyone who called himself Chet was a sack of shit—and Dmytro came back to record a final proof of life.
They would never hand him over to his family. Not ever.
He knew they wouldn’t, because as the son of prominent, wealthy Americans the idea of kidnap had haunted him all his life. Outside the US, kidnap and ransom was strictly an opportunistic business enterprise. In South America, in Africa, in Indonesia, even in Western Europe, there had always been the possibility he’d be taken, despite the security he traveled with. Ransoms would be paid by his family’s K&R insurance, and he would be returned, shaken but alive.
But being taken byIphicles—by men whose faces he knew, men who had successfully funneled him to a vessel at sea… There was no hope they would let him live, no matter what they said to his parents.
Dmytro couldn’t be fool enough to believe he stood a chance either.
When Dmytro switched sides, it had hurt. The betrayal had shocked him as brutally as Chet’s physical blow. It left his body drained and shaky, his spine turned to jelly.
He didn’t blame Dmytro. He didn’t hate Dmytro. In fact, seeing everything Dmytro was willing to do for his daughters,the chance he was taking, the long-odds gamble he’d made, Ajax could only admire him more.
Peter and Chet were the antithesis of men like Dmytro. They had no code. They carried no honor. In his desperate bid to save himself for his daughters, if Dmytro had to throw away the thing he’d been fighting hardest for—being a man his daughters could take pride in—he would. But he’d never forgive himself
Sorrow wounded Ajax’s heart like hammer blows.
No way was Dmytro walking away from this either.
Dmytro had to know that, right? He had to know that. Just as they couldn’t let Ajax live, they would be crazy to come back with Dmytro because he was already a mass of mixed emotions and old-fashioned guilt.
He was, as Chet pointed out, a do-gooder.
It would take exactly no time for Dmytro to make certain the threats Peter made against his daughters could never be fulfilled, and Peter probably knew that too.
If Dmytro lived, Peter’s days were numbered. Dmytro would kill him for speaking his daughters’ names aloud, much less uttering a threat against them.
And maybe Dmytro would make them pay for him too. Maybe he’d seek revenge on Ajax’s behalf, or for his parents, or because Anton had once been his mirage in a thirsty adolescence.
Dmytro would wipe Peter and Chet off the earth without prejudice because they were evil, and deep down, way inside him where he hardly ever looked, Dmytro was good.
Somehow none of that helped. None of it made spending the last hour of his life on a fucking boat with his hands and mouth taped any better. So he fidgeted to loosen his bonds. He tried to chew through the duct tape covering his mouth. And he wept, which was not only degrading, but it was making his nose stuffy.
At this rate, he was going to die from asphyxia.
Outside his door somewhere, the three men argued. Dmytro warned that if Ajax’s parents demanded another proof of life, they should get one. Chet and Peter said they’d had all the proof they were going to get.
Chet appeared in the doorway with a bottle of water. What were they trying to prove? It seemed absurd that they should offer him comfort when they were only going to throw him from the deck or shoot him or—
“Your boyfriend insists we give you water.”
Something must have shown on his face—some spark of happiness—because Chet laughed cruelly. “He don’t care or nothing. He just don’t want you to look like shit if your parents ask for a last-minute proof of life.”
Ajax nodded that he understood.
“I’m gonna take this tape off. You can yell all you want. There’s no one to hear you within fifty miles.”
He yanked the tape off, and it took some of Ajax’s skin with it. Ajax closed his eyes tightly against the pain, and when he opened them again, Chet stood so close he could smell his unwashed skin.
Chet stared down at Ajax, tilting his head this way and that. His gaze was blank, his face blank. His eyes were coal black, burning with a hatred that had been banked until now when it was fueled with the oxygen of desire.
Real fear swept over Ajax. He gave a shudder of revulsion.
Chet got a hard grip on his hair.
“Whatchu looking at, faggot.”
Ajax averted his gaze in the absolute wrong direction and found himself face-to-face with Chet’s crotch.
